I just built my computer a few days ago and i seem to be encountring a problem with the hard drive. Instead of being recognized as drive c:, its being recognized as e:. now at first i didnt think this was a problem, but now many software applications wont work becuase they try to automatically write to path c:. is there anyway i can tell the computer to recognize the hard drive as c: ? Also does it have to be reformated to do this? Thanks a ton.
~Dan

Which OS are you running? I know in XP you can change the drive letter without too much hassle. Go to disk management in the computer management control panel, right click on the drive and change drive letter and path.

But Logical Disk Manager can't change system partition's drive letter.
It sounds like you already had a FAT/NTFS partition on your harddisks and you installed NT by creating a new partition.. Then you had CD-drive as D: and the new system partition ended up as E:.

I'd probably format and repartition your hard disk since I'm pretty sure Mic is correct. It would be the best way to avoid problems with changing drive letters... It's also a good excuse to clean things up a bit too. Formatting is never a chore - It is the joy of life.

When you repartition next time, install Windows XP on the primary partition, rather than the extended one.

Im running windows xp. when i try to format the hard drive it wont work. i must be doing something wrong. can you tell me step by step what i have to do if you dont mind? thanks a ton
~Dan

you can try putting this in your startup group.

you may have to make a batch file

subst c: d:\whatever folder you want

where c: is the drive that will be substituted, and the d:\whatever is a folder that exists.

once this command is preformed windows should show a new drive under my computer that is c:

this is a workaround, and not everything in the world is gonna like it I bet but also I bet it will work for most stuff.

FW

You cannot format the system partition from within Windows because you are running the OS off the same partition you are formatting.

If you want a clean slate, boot off the XP installation CD, choose new installation. When it asks you what partition to install on, delete all your existing partitions (do you really want to do this?) and create new ones as you like. Install XP on the first partition.